The Capacities of the People Versus a Predominant, Militarist, Ethno-Nationalist Elite: Democratisation in South Africa C
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Interface: a journal for and about social movements Article Volume 3(2): 311 - 358 (November 2011) Good, The capacities of the people The capacities of the people versus a predominant, militarist, ethno-nationalist elite: democratisation in South Africa c. 1973 - 97 Kenneth Good The international and domestic settings From around 1970 to 1990 popular democracy made notable advances in many parts of the world against entrenched dictatorships, both communist and anti- communist, from Poland and the GDR (aka Stasiland) through Portugal, Chile and the Philippines. In Poland, the Solidarity trade union achieved a membership of some ten million at its height; the Stasiland surveillance state was swept away, not just with the fall of the Berlin wall, but after a series of large demonstrations in the cities proved to the people that their rulers possessed neither efficacy nor legitimacy; in Lisbon, a “Carnation Revolution” led by the military fresh from contact with national liberation forces in Portugal’s African colonies, backed by communist and other popular tendencies at home, brought an end to a long-established, quasi-fascist dictatorship; and in the Phillipines, a successful mass uprising against the US-backed regime of Ferdinand Marcos, presented the modern idea of “people power” to the world. South Africa was part of this popular democratic upsurge too, as an advancing capitalist economy, produced new skilled black working classes possessed of the capacities to form trade unions and other community groups ready and able to push for democratisation beyond the electoral confines of the liberal / representative model. But these domestic popular aspirations had to compete for attention in the outside world with an externally based armed struggle led by the African National Congress (ANC) whose leaders were mostly in exile and in prison. Two quite different processes of change were thus in contention in and around the country: the popular one stressing openness and accountability of elites to the people, and the other emphasising armed struggle led by established nationalist elites with, it is now quite clear, decidedly hegemonic and secretive tendencies. The latter forces aimed at liberation from an apartheid system almost universally condemned, and it was led by such renowned figures as Nelson Mandela, who was to spend 27 years in prison before his release on route to state power a few years later. While the supporters of democratisation in the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the trade unions did not directly seek to challenge the historic role of the ANC, the latter, as the 1980s wore on, showed an increasing intolerance for the values upheld by the UDF, like criticism and self-criticism of elites and non- violence. To the outside world, it was Mandela and the armed struggle led by the ANC which constituted the totality of change in South Africa. The ANC, it is now 311 Interface: a journal for and about social movements Article Volume 3(2): 311 - 358 (November 2011) Good, The capacities of the people clear, aimed at the elevation of its armed struggle as justification for its long- term rule, and the obliteration of the aims and achievements of the democratisation movement. It is the aim of this paper to disentangle the two inter-twined processes, to accord to the democratisation process the distinctions it deserves as a world-historical aspiration of its time, and to reveal some of the true costs of the ANC’s armed struggle not least to the young men and women who served as its rank-and-file. The well-springs of democratisation South Africa possessed in the early 1990s a relatively industrialised and diversified economy. As the country approached the year of majority rule, 1994, industry contributed some 37 per cent of gross domestic production (GDP), of which manufacturing represented 25 per cent. It was easily the strongest capitalist economy in Africa. Its GDP of some $133 billion ranked it around thirtieth in the world, or twenty third in terms of purchasing power. In regard to employment, agriculture contributed about 10 per cent of the national total, industry 25 per cent and services 64 per cent. There was a well developed infrastructure built upon roads, railways and sea and air ports, extensive urbanisation, and technological and scientific resources superior to anything else in Africa. Despite the manifold distortions and wastefulness of the apartheid system, the developmental capacities of the state were high.1 The exigencies of advanced capitalist development offered big opportunities to black workers. In the 1950s they had been confined to unskilled labour, but a burgeoning economy and an ever-growing state bureaucracy required increasing numbers of black clerical and junior executive workers, and thus in turn a big increase in black secondary and tertiary education. Between 1965 and 1975, the numbers of black pupils attending secondary schools rose almost five fold to some 319,000. Industrial capitalists made their own contribution to new class formation from the end of the 1960s, reorganizing the labour force towards reliance upon black skilled workers, and pressured the state into corresponding policy changes; from the early 1970s, government made “far more money available for urban black schools”. In greater Soweto, for instance, there were eight secondary schools in 1972; 20 by 1976, with a three-fold increase in their student intake, and 55 by the end of 1984. The 1980 census had revealed that a majority of the black population were under 21. Secondary student numbers rose from 600,000 in 1980 to more than one million in 1984, boosted by a new school building programme at that time.2 1 Good, “Accountable to Themselves: Predominance in Southern Africa”, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 35, 4, 1997, pp. 547-8, and Tom Lodge, “South Africa: Democracy and Development in a Post-Apartheid Society”, in Adrian Leftwich (ed.), Democracy and Development: Theory and Practice, Cambridge, 1996, p. 196. 2 Jonathan Hyslop, “School Student Movements and State Education Policy: 1972-87”, in William Cobbett and Robin Cohen (eds.), Popular Struggles in South Africa, Sheffield and London, Africa World Press and James Currey, 1988, pp. 184-85 and 191. 312 Interface: a journal for and about social movements Article Volume 3(2): 311 - 358 (November 2011) Good, The capacities of the people In consequence, secondary schooling was transformed from being the privileged resource of a black elite into a “mass phenomenon” with an “urban school-based culture and consciousness”. High school students in the conglomerate of Soweto were well placed to draw together literate youths on a large scale, utilising networks of extra-mural associations, and assuming, graphically in June 1976, political leadership; protests against inferior education and enforced Afrikaans teaching, met police repression and spread nationwide.3 New activist local leaders emerged. Popo Molefe, for example, was born in 1952 to a father who was a day labourer and his mother a domestic worker; all the family, he later recalled, were “extremely poor”. He was trucked to Soweto from Sophiatown when the latter was declared a white area in 1955 and achieved Standard 10 (the leaving certificate).4 He helped organize the march of 16 June. Murphy Morobe was born a little later in Soweto to a father who was a driver. In 1976 he was in Standard 10 at the Morris Isaacson High School, and also helped organize the student demonstration. Both were active in various groups and became prominent in the UDF. Access to tertiary education also broadened. In 1960 there were fewer than 800 blacks at universities, excluding distance-learning programmes offered by the University of South Africa (UNISA), but by 1983 there were about 20,000 at university with another 12,700 enrolled at UNISA. Within the twelve year period, 1958-70, the numbers had arisen in excess of 200 per cent.5 A big step forward in black student organization came in 1969 with the formation of the South African Students Organization (SASO) led by Steve Biko and a harbinger of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). SASO, in Gwala’s view, transformed black universities into “major sites of political struggle” and connected students to the wider political struggles. By 1972 SASO was represented on all black campuses and it had an estimated membership of about 6,000. Biko’s ideas were radical and profound. He aimed to revitalise a demoralised older generation, and he believed, according to Halisi, that political action had to approximate to a new way of life. Mass education could be extended by committed intellectuals with a knowledge of popular culture who would energise the oppressed. But for an emancipatory politics to achieve success, new values and practices would have to be prefigured in the opposition movement.6 3 Jeremy Seekings, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983- 1991, Cape Town and Oxford, David Philip and James Currey, 2000, p. 11. 4 Steven Mufson, Fighting Years: Black Resistance and the Struggle for a New South Africa, Boston, Beacon Press, 1990, p. 43. 5 Seekings, op.cit., p. 12 and Nkosinathi Gwala, “State Control, Student Politics and the Crisis in Black Universities”, in Cobbett and Cohen, op.cit., p. 175. 6 Gwala, op.cit., p. 176 and C.R.D. Halisi, “Biko and Black Consciousness Philosophy: An Interpretation”, in N. Barney Pityana, Mamphela Ramphele, Malusi Mpumlwana and Lindy Wilson, Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness, Cape Town and London, David Philip and Zed Books, pp. 101 and 108-9, his emphasis. 313 Interface: a journal for and about social movements Article Volume 3(2): 311 - 358 (November 2011) Good, The capacities of the people Natal Medical School offered Mamphela Ramphele not only socially important knowledge and skills, but also, she said, “an environment for the transformation of my life”.